The Learning and Fun Continue as September Goes On!

Dear Parents,

We hope you had a great time celebrating the Ethiopian New Year! We’re excited to share this week’s blog to give you all our weekly highlights, so you can all follow up with what your child has been learning this week. This week, our class kept learning about numbers 1-10 in math. We also started the five senses concept in science. Furthermore, the class did an amazing job learning about body parts!

Large Group

Our large group is the time when we listen to everyone as they get to share about their weekend, mornings and their new ideas and emotions. This week our large group book title was ‘Froggy Goes to School’. This book shares Froggy’s experience of his first day of school and how he felt on his first day of school. 

For this week the letter was ‘b’, the number was two ‘2’, triangle and yellow were the shape and the color of the week.

“Triangle has three sides. One, two, three.” Hala

“That paper is yellow” Riley

“Two dogs” Liyat

Math

This week we started our math session by counting numbers 1-10. Since our focus for this week was counting objects, we prepared different counters for the students to use such as teddy bears and cubes. All were engaged as they chose the number they wanted to count and the counters too!

Science

In science we started learning about our five senses. We began by reviewing the body parts we have been learning about and then focused on two of the five senses- touching and smelling.

For touching, we played a game where we covered the touching boards and had children touch it one by one and describe how it felt. Additionally, they learnt new vocabulary like ‘bumpy, soft and hard’.

Moreover, for the smelling activity we got some herbs from our school garden. We first talked about how the herbs look, their color and the size of their leaves, then we started smelling them and shared if they had smelled it before or not.

Through this session we worked on different skills such as: environmental awareness, language development and cognitive development.

Library

Our class marched into the library excitedly as everyone was looking forward to enjoying a new story and taking another book home! This week's story title was ‘Biscuit Loves the Library’.

“I like the library because there is a lot of books” Nina

Music

The class was active as ever in this week’s music session! We began by talking about the instruments that we explored before- ‘Xylophone, keyboard, shaker’ and introduced another two instruments ‘Drum and piano’.

Everyone was so excited to try these two instruments and listen to the sounds that they make. The discovery of the session was when you hit the drum on the edges it makes a different sound than when you hit in the middle.  

Gymnastics

This week in our gymnastics session we had a balancing activity which is a fun way to develop gross motor skills, coordination and body awareness.

We also did another activity which is moving musical dots from one spot to the other while holding a plank position. This activity not only challenges children’s physical abilities but also their coordination and focus. The children all did a fantastic job and were very engaged with both activities!

Ethiopian Center

What a time it was in the Ethiopian center this week! We started off by talking about what the center is and what are the things that we could do in it. After that, everyone headed to proceed with the plan they have, some got busy making coffee, others were exploring the traditional musical instruments and some were having fun putting some traditional clothes on. We ended our session by practicing the ‘Ababay Yehwsh’ song getting ready for our Meskel celebration.

Our next week’s schedule

Tuesday- Science

Wednesday- Literacy

Our Specials

Tuesday- Library

Thursday- Art

Friday- Ethiopian center+ Gymnastics

Reminders and notes

• Please note that on Monday, September 16 school will be closed for Maulid. We wish anyone observing the holiday a very happy Maulid. See you all on Tuesday!

• Our art class has been moved to Thursday so make sure your child is wearing suitable clothes on Thursday as activities get messy sometimes.

• Tuesday is our library class so make sure to send the previous book back to exchange.

Have a great weekend!